I was surfing the internet last week and found this review of the first book.
It makes me lose my faith in reviewers and also debate the question of whether romance readers want to read a good romance or a good book, because the first book in this series is decidedly not the latter. Maybe I’ll do a think piece on that later, but for now it’s on with the show!
The chapter starts out in Azrael’s POV, who’s still having physical pain from thinking about Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers and tells Wesley that Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver “didn’t belong here.”
Based on what? That he was clean? It’s not impossible to keep body and clothes washed living in a slum, no matter what the writer thinks. That he was alone? There’s been a passing reference to it being night, but we don’t have a clue how late it is. He could be coming home from some after-school activity. That he wasn’t afraid? Maybe he lives nearby and feels safe. Other than Azrael noticing his pickled aura, there wasn’t anything to support her conclusion and she doesn’t provide any objective proof.
Wesley seems to agree with me here, which is a pleasant surprise, but he’s just playing devil’s advocate to undercut Azrael’s confidence in her own conclusions. After calling Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver scrawny (something Azrael also called Morty in the first book), he deflects onto her protecting sex workers and calls them her hookers. Yes, I guess they are now a wholly or partially owned subsidiary of Demon Slayers LLC. Those hostile takeovers get you every time.
They get into a conversation about purpose, where Azrael does some mental dick-sucking about how special Wesley is and can’t understand depravity (I think this one’s about her third-favorite word in this book so far). He objects to her hanging out with sex workers as it’s too dangerous for WESLEY’S PROPERTY and she can’t handle pimps.
“Who get real mean on occasion. I know. I’ve seen it. And more.” God hadn’t asked for her intervention with the abusive johns. But she’d given it anyway—and enjoyed herself.
I’m not sure if I can call this a No Edit Clause fail, because based on what’s on the page I can’t tell if Azrael doesn’t know the difference between a pimp and a john or if Lori Foster doesn’t know the difference. But an editor would have known the difference, so it is a No Edit Clause fail.
She then refers to “men who…claim ownership of the ladies,” which is a pimp but not what she was thinking of earlier. I can imagine her sneering the phrase ”the ladies,” just to assert her own superiority.
Anyway, she’s congratulating herself on the shred of agency she’s managed to wrest away from God by protecting sex workers and takes a few minutes to drool over how ridiculously good-looking Wesley is.
This will be a running theme in the book. No, I haven’t read it all the way through yet (I take my pain in chapter-sized doses), but it was a theme in the first book and I can’t imagine the writer will change that.
Luther utters a “rank curse” in a whisper (non-specific swearing will also be a running theme, as the writer doesn’t like swearing but her characters insist on it and she can’t tell them no), despite him having objections to her “coarse manners” in the previous chapter and spending the entire last book pearl-clutching about her foul language. At least that gives us a little implied background for him: he was never in the military.
They get into a conversation about pimps and Azrael talks about slashing them up at night (not killing but injuring) and doesn’t tell Wesley about how much pleasure she feels from it, but he’s properly horrified anyhow.
Then they get to talking about sex—that didn’t take long. It’s all unfunny attempted rom-com dialogue and doesn’t serve to advance anything about the plot other than letting the reader in on the fact that Azrael’s made friends with some sex workers and is willing to learn about sex from them, although, as she is careful to note to Wesley, that doesn’t include any same-sex exploration, which she brushes off as dirty.
Wesley asserts his ownership of her sexuality by reminding her that they’d agreed she’d bring her sex questions to him. By the way, according to page 199 of Awakening, Azrael did not agree to that when he made the demand, so welcome back gaslighting. I’m glad I didn’t throw the first book on a sacrificial pyre at Halloween the way I originally intended.
The writer puts the reasonable objection in her mouth that she wasn’t going to see him again and makes the excellent point that none of the sex workers are nearly as hung up about sex as Wesley and Morty are. I’m sure it won’t last long, though.
So Wesley gets mad again (indicated by his jaw clenching) and tells her prostitution and sex with “someone special” are different. Azrael thinks sex is gross and notes that she’s sometimes watched the sex workers with their clients while she was protecting them and of course Wesley goes off.
“I do not want you watching that warped shit!”
The acts themselves are the same whether they’re done for love or money, so what does that say about your attitude toward sex, Wesley? Remember when you had the alley make-out session with Azrael and told her that sex is great when it’s two consenting adults and “anything goes?” Well, a sex worker and a client are both consenting and presumably anything goes (or at least certain acts were agreed to), so what does that do to your argument?
And then she calls him Daddy. Mockingly, but it’s still there. I thought I might have made too much of the revival theater pre-date in the first book with its daddy/daughter overtones, so thanks for letting me know I picked up on something which was there.
Azrael’s challenging him, so he wants to get control back as he “loomed over” her and telling her he’s still mad she escaped from him and is suspicious of her. And he has reason, although he’s in so much denial he’ll never admit it.
And somehow what he says pulls this reaction out of her.
That sobered her and sucked the anger out of her veins. Crestfallen, doused in icy reality, she nodded. “I know.”
There is no reason for her to react the way the writer depicts it. Why would she be hurt that he’s suspicious of her? He’s been suspicious of her for their entire relationship, even before she’d done anything criminal, and she knew it. This is nothing new and special.
Keep in mind their relationship up until this point: it’s consisted of relentless sexual harassment and psychological manipulation on his part and verbal refusal followed by capitulation on hers. They’ve had a make-out session in an alley and one date that he basically forced her to go on. He waffles about suspecting her of being a murderer because the author knows it would be pretty sick to be gagging for sex with someone who’s committed brutalities that give a cop nightmares. She mistakenly believes she has a basis of trust with this man despite his doing nothing to deserve this, apparently just because her hormones have kicked in for the first time.
Complying only make his “fury” worse because it exposes weakness that he can exploit. He tells her that if she “forces his hand,” he’ll arrest her “scrawny ass” and take her downtown.
Azrael says, “Go ahead and arrest me. I’m sure the other cops will be very interested in your failure to arrest me for any number of charges and the ceaseless sexual harassment I’ve been subjected to by you.”
No, she doesn’t say that. She’s too stupid to call a bluff. Instead, she tells him they won’t ever have a sexual relationship due to his suspicions and threats. She doesn’t phrase it that way, but she makes it clear it’s because of his behavior. I’d respect this stance if I thought the writer would let her stick to it, but she won’t because this is a romance and no matter how “strong” the heroine is, a woman’s job in this particular flavor of romance is to fold like Superman doing laundry. Then she starts to leave.
In a roar loud enough to disrupt the dead, Luther demanded, “Where are you going?”
Apropos of nothing, last week I had to take a training module at work on the subject of workplace harassment. We have to repeat these modules once a year. When I got to the sexual harassment section, seven criteria for sexual harassment were given and Wesley here ticked five of them. The only way he could be more of a sexual harasser is if Azrael worked for him and he told her, “Give me a blowjob or you’re fired.”
Anyway, she’s told Wesley something he doesn’t want to hear and attempted to make it stick. Of course he won’t allow that and tries to intimidate her by shouting at her. Please bear in mind than less than ten minutes ago, Wesley had forced Azrael into a wall and jammed a gun into her chest. A few minutes after that, he’s slammed her into that same wall again, with a hand around her throat and her hands restrained over her head.
Foster’s still trying to do the cutesy-pie rom-com dialogue, but I cannot imagine why she thinks any of this is funny or cute or even appropriate. In fact, I would think if a person has been in an abusive relationship it would be very triggering.
Anyway, when he asks her where she’s going, she tells him she’s going to see Morty and mouths off about whether he’s going to arrest her for it. Here’s how he responds to that.
Sudden his hand clamped around her upper arm—
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 15
–and he drew her to an uncompromising, but gentle halt.
Clamping is gentle, right. Your little fig leaves of fake tenderness aren’t covering the beaver shot of violence here. Also, he’s once again forcing her to do something she doesn’t want to do, namely continue interacting with him, but he doesn’t need to respect her wishes or boundaries because he’s the hero. What an ugly, barren thing romance is here.
So Wesley gives her permission to go see Morty but insists he must know where she’ll be tomorrow. She pretends she doesn’t know why he would want that and then we go into a skin-crawling “sensuous” interlude, at the end of which he says,
“When you’re like this, Gaby, you’re far more likable.”
Yeah, when you shut up and stop resisting, he likes you a lot better. He tells her to meet him in this alley—I guess, the writing isn’t clear—tomorrow at seven. She’s justifiably angry that he used sex to manipulate her, and he reacts by looking at her hard nipples and “lifted a taunting eyebrow.” So he shames her for having had a sexual response to him. What a prize.
So the writer’s three favorite words so far in this book are:
- Whore
- Depravity
- Taunt/taunted/taunting
He then insists she promise she’ll meet him tomorrow. Azrael threatens to castrate him—sorry, the writer is mealy-mouthed and doesn’t like strong imagery and phrases it as “turn him into a choirboy,” which also furthers the angel imagery she’s at pains to use regarding him, even though choirboys aren’t castrato anymore—but he’s expansively happy because in his mind he’s back in control of the situation and pays no attention to her words and forces a kiss on her.
Foster’s used some odd words to describe kissing that I wouldn’t go so far as to call archaic, but they don’t seem to be in common use anymore. In the last chapter of Awakening, Wesley forced a kiss on Detective Ann Kennedy, which was described as “a sound smacker on her mulish mouth” and here the forced kiss on Azrael is described as “a fast smooch on her mouth.” As opposed to their elbows, I guess. Smacker and smooch just sound juvenile to me, like a thirteen-year-old describing what’s happening, but Azrael is the one whose psychosexual development has been arrested at age thirteen, so I don’t know why Wesley’s using these words.
Then Azrael does in fact promise to meet him because she has a spine like cooked vermicelli. Then he mentions her hair and clothing and disapproves of her saying fuck. How anybody can think a man this controlling is #relationshipgoals I will never know. Azrael fesses up that it wasn’t her idea to put on a miniskirt and ankle boots and dye her hair—oh, no. It was “the ladies’ doing.” Then Wesley rephases that as “hookers.” Then there’s some pseudo-romantic dialogue, Wesley takes a look at the dog collar marking her as WESLEY’S PROPERTY and leaves. By coincidence, he’s walking toward the building where she’s staying and she’s worried about whether he knows where she lives.
There’s a section break that starts with Wesley watching Azrael walk away from a place of concealment, just like chapter 1 started out. He thinks she walks in a cocky way and stares at her “narrow ass” until she’s out of sight. Drinking game that will kill you in short order: take a shot every time the writer uses the words slim, thin, bony, or narrow in reference to any part of the heroine’s body.
Then he calls Morty to tell him that he found Azrael and she’s coming to see him. Morty’s all freaked out about him letting her come back to the apartment building alone, because neither of these men has ever seen her fight and/or kill—oh wait, yes, they both have. So there is no reason to react this way except that all women are helpless vagina-havers, amirite?
Just to fill in people who didn’t read the snarks for the last book, here’s the relationship between the two men up until now. Morty was Azrael’s landlord and Wesley decided to pretend to be his friend to get information out of him about Azrael by convincing him to spy on her and report back. Morty was flattered by that and truly believed that Wesley was his friend, which must not have changed yet.
Wesley takes a second to note that “a near-death experience had neatly matured Morty into a man almost overnight.” Well, a beta-Wesley, anyway. Keep in mind that the thing that Azrael noted gave Morty purpose was killing a woman, and that the author didn’t see that when she was writing it. What Wesley considers maturity was Morty becoming more like him. And there was nothing wrong with Morty until the venom from the writer’s pen hit his brain and he turned into a thrall of Azrael, the future dark queen of hell.
Anyway, there are a couple of paragraphs of Wesley musing about Azrael that are boring and do nothing but clue us in that he does know where she lives. Apparently she’s staying in a motel that’s a “den of iniquity” in his eyes. I’m having a hard time believing Wesley is thirty-two years old. He sounds more like a very religious sixty-eight-year-old, with all his pearl-clutching over her language and clothes and lack of socialization and proper deference to him as a man.
Plus, there is no way, based on the timeline that seems to exist between the first book ending and the second book beginning, that he would have had enough time to do any police work and find out where she lives, even knowing how little police work he does. However, we do have to acknowledge that this book is the product of the Queen of the Fucked Timeline.
Are we to assume she’s renting a room in a hot-sheet motel under her real name? Since she has never displayed any false identification or talked about any connections that could get her some, I guess she is.
Here are a few other things Wesley stumbled over purely by accident: Murdered Mutilated Grandpa’s corpse, Azrael’s residence at Morty’s one-doored apartment building that must phase-shift into a duplex unpredictably, judging by the writer’s descriptions, and he current residence.
So he’s planning on interrogating the call girls (street prostitutes are not call girls, by the way) and the manager to get intel on her. And hey, presto! There are three sex workers outside the motel where Azrael’s living. How lucky for him! Every description of sex workers in this book and the last indicate that the writer has never seen a prostitute in the wild in her life and hasn’t even bothered to read anything that might inform her writing. Like this one where the sex workers make him for a cop at first glance and the sixty-eight-year-old preacher speaks up:
That didn’t convince them to close their legs or their mouths. Lewd comments, void of any real offering, would have brought a blush to a man unaccustomed to such human dreariness.
Ooh, preacher shows off his vocabulary! Honey, these are professional sex workers who know you’re a cop. They aren’t going to solicit you because they don’t want the hassle of getting arrested and having their pimp bail them out. And I don’t think they would work straight out front of where they live. They’d have their corner on the main hooker drag, pick up a client there, and maybe bring him back to the motel if he didn’t want to do it in an alley (like Wesley always seems to) or his car. There’s also a line in the paragraph before that about the women being “[i]n raunchy poses that exposed overused body parts.” I’m amusing myself imagining a Cubist Picasso painting.
Anyway, the dialogue between the sex workers and Wesley is cringe-inducingly bad. It’s as cardboard as anything you’d see in a Seventies TV cop show and designed solely to move the plot forward. A weakness of Foster’s writing is that the characters don’t have individual voices, except Azrael to a limited degree because the writer wants her to sound like a potty-mouthed tough girl until she accepts her destiny as a woman and embraces being WESLEY’S PROPERTY. Otherwise, every character sounds like every other character.
A sex worker who’s a cigarette-smoking redhead with missing molars (at least she’s doing more physical description in this book) claims ignorance of Azrael and Wesley threatens to arrest them all if they don’t give him information. The redhead reasonably asks what he’s charging them with and he tells her indecent exposure while using his badge to touch the inside of her thigh, which I would think is inappropriate but whatever. So now we know they didn’t close their legs so the writer could set up this little comeuppance for their unabashed sexuality. This writer should never again write anything that touches on sex workers at all in any way, because it feels like she won’t do research, even to the extent of reading books outside the romance genre. You can tell she never cracked the Burke series by Andrew Vachss. And we find out the redhead’s name is Betty. Maybe in the Fifties it would have been
Plus, this is the reason they put body cams on cops.
The sex workers curse him out and he gets out his radio to call it in. You know, the thing he didn’t do when Azrael got attacked by a group of drunks at their first meeting. All he did then was watch her fight off the attack, get into his own fight with her, and sexually harass her for five to ten minutes. It still strikes me as wrong that they have a plainclothes cop carrying a radio, but let’s move on.
And the pimp shows up! His name is Jimbo, like Stan Marsh’s uncle in South Park. The author finally introduces a named non-white character here, as he’s described as “likely [had] a mixed racial background.” She doesn’t mention which races are mixed here, but he also has a gold tooth in front and has a knife, so I doubt if she meant he was half Japanese. I didn’t know how good I had it when she used the “white-by-default” trope. I was stunned she didn’t have the Pimp with a White Redneck’s Name pull out a straight razor since it’s Stereotype Day.
Just for some perspective, Harvey Keitel’s pimp character in Taxi Driver was named Sport. Morgan Freeman’s pimp character in Street Smart had the street name Fast Black. The biracial pimp in Acceptance has the street name Jimbo. One of these things is not like the others…
Anyway, Jimbo Kern asks Wesley why he’s interested, which he would never do. He is a criminal and the rule of the streets is tell the cops nothing, which is what Red Betty did. He doesn’t even know if there’s anything in it for him yet.
Sensing an ally, Luther moved closer.
A criminal as an ally in breaking Azrael to his will—this bespeaks Wesley’s essential corruption. In a few paragraphs he’ll be boiling over with fury over Jimbo Kern’s yelling at Red Betty—not hitting her or anything, just taking “a threatening step” in her direction and yelling—because the writer realized her misstep and, once again, instead of fixing the original problem, she goes on to try to handwave the issue out of existence. Or it might just be that the pimp called his girls “stupid bitches,” and we know how Wesley feels about swearing, unless he’s doing it himself in a non-specific manner.
Red Betty floats the ridiculous notion of her having a break rather than being lazy as Jimbo Kern sees it. Is she unionized? Does she get half an hour lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks per eight-hour day? This leads to the threatening step and the stupid bitches crack, which inspires Wesley’s signature emotion of rage and he flexes that he wouldn’t have allowed the pimp to smack her.
Hey, smacker has a violent connotation I didn’t catch! And that’s the juvenile kiss descriptor that Ann Kennedy got on her “mulish mouth.” Interesting.
So Jimbo Kern doesn’t take this badly and runs off at the mouth about Azrael without even seeing if he can get anything in exchange for the information. Unrealistic pimp, I tells ya. He thinks Azrael’s “psychotic,” with which I would agree. The reason is because she’s barricaded the door to her room (must be hard to get outside, then) and reinforced the locks, and lets on that he said something to her, so Wesley reins in his rage for the second time in five minutes as he “oozes menace” and “disregards the knife” to try physically intimidating Jimbo Kern.
Jimbo Kern at the point refers to the motel as a “whorehouse,” which is factually incorrect because whorehouses have much more controlled access that a motel. A person can’t just walk up and say, “I want to rent a room here, but I don’t want to sell my body,” even if you have the money to rent the room. This is a hot-sheet motel, which is not a whorehouse; it just rents rooms by the hour.
Then he says something that indicates she had a fight with him and Wesley thinks:
God almighty, Luther would kill her himself.
So what is she supposed to do when a pimp starts threatening her? Suck his dick? Join his stable? I ask these questions but already know the answer: Wesley thinks she should act like a proper female and call him to handle the situation because only men can handle other men. And in response to that, I ask Wesley, “Why can’t you find a woman who’s already a proper female in your view and have an abusive relationship with her instead?” But I know it’s because he likes a challenge, so let’s move on.
Then Wesley tells Jimbo Kern that if he thought Azrael was whoring out for him, Wesley would kill him. And probably get away with it since Jimbo Kern isn’t white and is a criminal, but moving on.
We get into some dialogue that introduces a new character named Carver, who used to run Jimbo Kern’s section of the street and is described as a “hillbilly punk,” so we know he’s white and probably young, who Jimbo Kern thinks Azrael may be concerned about and thinks himself is coming after her for sure.
Carver—get it? For the knives? Why does everybody in this universe love knives so much? The only people who have guns are Azrael and Wesley, and neither ever uses them. Plus, I wonder if he’ll turn out to be Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver or just become his minion.
Jimbo Kern tries to make a deal with Wesley—this would have been something you should have done before you opened your mouth at all, because you would have been in a power position then, while now he knows what you know and has no motivation to deal with you. He wants Carver dealt with and Azrael “off his corner.” She isn’t working your corner, Jimbo Kern, and you know this because your girls know this and they would tell you. It’s like the writer got familiar with a few phrases and thought that was enough research for the book. And then he says that Azrael’s annoying him by making his girls “uppity” (interesting word choice for a biracial man), causing a business downturn, and just being a general irritant.
Then Wesley punches him in the gut, hard enough to make him vomit, after about three paragraphs of internal monologuing mentioning “the urge to destroy this psychopathic little cretin” and “the urge for destruction.” Psychopathic? Takes one to know one. Wesley agrees to deal with Carver but Jimbo Kern has to make sure Azrael doesn’t get hurt and protect her. And then he virtue-signals by saying that Jimbo sure likes to mouth off to women but can’t fight (Romantic Hero trope: he is always in control of his violence).
How is Jimbo Kern, who got dropped by one punch to the abdomen that he should have been able to see coming, going to be useful for protection? Azrael may be an incompetent fighter, but she’s never been dropped like that. Oh, right, it’s because Wesley knows she’s a helpless vagina-haver. Right, I forgot.
Jimbo Kern then makes the excellent point that punching him wasn’t necessary. And here’s what Wesley says to that.
“No, probably not. But I wanted to.”
Yeah, he’ll make a wonderful father, with that hair-trigger temper and propensity toward violence.
Then he grabs Jimbo Kern by the shoulder (not sure about counting that in the Wesley Arm Grab Counter as it’s a shoulder grab and not Azrael) and gets more information about Carver. There’s an incident where Carver beat up one of his girls and Azrael didn’t approve but said nothing. Jimbo Kern calls her a “psycho cunt” and Wesley has the following reaction.
Lingering on the periphery of an insane rage, Luther whispered, “You are dumber than you look, Jimbo, do you know that?”
You’ve been in a rage since page one of chapter one, so tell us something new. And you’re the one who’s being dumb here. There is no reason for Jimbo Kern to know that Azrael is YOUR PROPERTY just because she’s wearing that dog collar that means so much to you but nothing to him. He probably thinks you’re a standard cop investigating a standard criminal. Maybe you shouldn’t have had a cross put on that dog collar but had WESLEY’S PROPERTY emblazoned on it instead. Then you could call Jimbo dumb all day long for calling your escaped stalking victim a psycho cunt. Then Wesley makes an unspecified threat about what he’ll do if Jimbo Kern calls her another name or slurs her again.
This whole scene is tin-eared and troubling. This is a biracial black man who’s being written by a white woman who doesn’t understand certain facts of life that any black man, biracial or otherwise, criminal or otherwise, would understand, like the fact that a white cop in America could shoot him to death for no reason at all and get away with it. That is why there’s no way Jimbo would have pulled out that knife in front of Wesley. Chances are excellent that he wouldn’t even have reached under his jacket, so as not to give Wesley the excuse to kill him. All Wesley would have to say after murdering Jimbo is “He came at me with a weapon. I was afraid for my life,” and, in the absence of any witnesses or video footage, Internal Affairs would rubber-stamp it as a justified shooting and he would go on his merry way. Jimbo is not free in this society to act the way that the writer has him behaving. Even if he were as stupid as Wesley thinks, he would have enough instinct for self-preservation not to behave like this.
I was dead wrong to think Lori Foster needed to include minority characters just because the setting is majority-minority. She needs to go right back to the white-by-default trope so scenes like this don’t happen.
Anyway, Jimbo tells Wesley that after this incident, Carver was found tied to his bed and slashed up shallowly all over, including his penis. Wesley instantly knows this was Azrael, as she “had…practically admitted as much.” Shame you didn’t take it this seriously when she practically admitted to killing Murdered Mutilated Grandpa, but then you would have had to arrest her and your boner wouldn’t have liked that.
Then Wesley decides to pretend he doesn’t know she’s connected to that. There’s more dialogue, then he forbids Jimbo Kern from using her name, which has the unpleasant overtones of white man telling a black man he isn’t good enough to use a white woman’s name.
There’s some more dialogue and then this cringy scene comes to an end with Wesley giving Jimbo Kern his business card and getting offended because he knows where Azrael’s room is. And somehow this motel has an attic, proving that the author doesn’t know what a motel is any more than she knew that an apartment building needed more than one door.
No Edit Clause insures this scene was written as badly as possible. All it really needed to be realistic was to switch up the sequence of events some, which also would have made it more in character for Wesley. The scene would go as originally written for Red Betty and the sex workers and until briefly after Jimbo Kern appears. Wesley asks about Azrael, and Jimbo Kern asks, “What’s in it for me to tell you?”
Wesley then loses control of his hair-trigger temper that he’s been restraining for 29 pages now and beats the brakes off Jimbo Kern. Not just the one expert punch that both maintains the fiction that Wesley is in control of his violence and causes Jimbo Kern to throw up and be humiliated in the face of a dominant white man, but a beating that just misses putting him in the hospital. Red Betty and the sex workers take off screaming and Wesley hauls him up to demand information, and Jimbo Kern gives him this information because he’s scared and injured. See? Both more believable and truer to character.
Wesley decides to break into Azrael’s room, as there isn’t any security and nobody at the front desk. This motel is three stories high and has an attic which is reached by a narrow staircase. Do not call this a motel as this is not a motel. Here are some pictures of three-story motels, none of which have attics. Motels do not have attics. He doesn’t know why she’s staying here but is determined to find out, and the chapter ends with this line.
This time, before she escaped him again, Luther would get some answers—one way or another.
Did she mean him to sound like the villain here? I’m thinking not.
Next time, chapter 3, where Azrael has a flashback to Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers, meets Morty for the first time since believing he was dead, and fights off an attack.
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